Thursday, August 7, 2014

Adam Gorightly on Illuminatus!, Week 24


Adam Gorightly has a new post up about the business card of page 236 of Illuminatus! that says, "There is no enemy anywhere."

It's an actual card that Greg Hill  used to give out as part of Operation Mindfuck, and as Adam points out, there is a serious point behind it. He explains that it was a "LDD programming tool" (e.g., the Discordian "Legion of Dynamic Discord") and that it "was another method to deliver a new imprint to Oedipuski’s head—that neither the radical right or radical left were 'real' enemies of one another—and that to become truly free, one needed to escape the Us-Against-Them groupthink matrix."

The "Us-Against-Them groupthink matrix" is a regular feature of U.S. politics, and is generally used to disguise the fact that the most important decisions already have been made -- it's OK for a U.S. president to start a new war anytime he wants, it's OK for the government to spy on everyone and assemble massive dossiers, it's OK to give massive amounts of tax money to Israel,  it's OK  to give away tax money to support specific private enterprises, and so on. These are policy positions that most Democrats and Republicans agree on, regardless of their supposedly important partisan differences.

I'll also add that much of the U.S. political system is driven by classifying foreigners are "enemies." Politicians from both parties are forever reminding us that they want to take away our jobs through trade, they want to swarm across the borders to live next to us, they want to commit acts of terrorism against us, they want to force us to do something about global warming, and on and on and on.

I'm afraid I've taken Adam's post and gone off on a bit of a rant. So to return to his post, it's another illustration of how knowing the history of Discordianism can educate the reader on how the movement had a strong influence on the text of Illuminatus! 

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